Quotes about absence

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“I was enveloped in numbness, and absence of feeling so deep the bottom was lost from view.”

“… in the absence of will power, the most complete collection of virtues and talents is wholly worthless.”

“The absence of pain means death, so when something no longer bothers you, you've died to that thing.”

“And the gentleness that comes,
not from the absence of violence, but despite
the abundance of it.”

“If happiness is the absence of fever then I will never know happiness. For I am posessed by a fever for knowledge, experience and creation.”

“Absence of proof is not proof of absence.”

“Being oppressed means the absence of choices”

“I do want your happiness. But the absence of fighting or hatred or desire also means the opposites do not exist either. No joy, no communion, no love. Only where there is disillusionment and depression and sorrow does happiness arise; without the despair of loss, there is no hope.”

“In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.”

“But the absence of tears wasn't the same as an absence of feeling.”

“I close my eyes, thinking that there is nothing like an embrace after an absence, nothing like fitting my face into the curve of his shoulder and filling my lungs with the scent of him.”

“Indeed, the human mind appeared to suffer from a crippling need to fabricate in the absence of concrete proof.”

“It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.”

“I suppose now I'm obliged to wish you happiness in your new life. Although happiness in the absence of indoor plumbing is a debatable concept.”

“Your fears are not walls, but hurdles. Courage is not the absence of fear, but the conquering of it.”

“I never, even for a moment, doubted what they’d told me. This is why it is that adults and even parents can, unwittingly, be cruel: they cannot imagine doubt’s complete absence. They have forgotten.”

“Absence feeds affection.”

“He who has not God in himself cannot feel His absence.”

“Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time, and sometimes it seemed to me that her abandonment touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness, a point with no width, occupying no space.”

“What any true painting touches is an absence - an absence of which without the painting, we might be unaware. And that would be our loss.”

“Absence of Quality is the essence of squareness.”

“The day he moved out was terrible –
That evening she went through hell.
His absence wasn’t a problem
But the corkscrew had gone as well.”

“Courage is not the absence of fear but the awareness that something else is more important.”

“The absence of the will to live is, alas, not sufficient to make one want to die.”

“Silence was not the absence of sound but was itself a sound that could be loud or soft, soothing or disturbing, complex or simple.”

“When anybody, no matter how old they are, loses a parent, I think it hurts the same as if you were only five years old, you know? I think all of us are always five years old in the presence and absence of our parents.”

“Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence.”

“Better not to invent her in her absence. Better to wait until she's actually here. Then he can make her up as she goes along.”

“And one has to understand that braveness is not the absence of fear but rather the strength to keep on going forward despite the fear.”

“There is
By my leaning over the precipice
Of your presence and your absence in hopeless fusion
My finding the secret
Of loving you
Always for the first time”

“My lungs are thick with the smoke of your absence.”

“Free again, but it's just a feeling; freedom is not the absence of commitments, but the ability to choose - and commit yourself to what is best for you.”

“Life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience that primordial shamanism is based on is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego.”

“How often does a man ruin his disciples by remaining always with them! When men are once trained, it is essential that their leader leave them, for without his absence they cannot develop themselves. Plants always remain small under a big tree.”

“In the absence of clearly-defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia until ultimately we become enslaved by it.”

“She wanted nothing that he could offer her, except perhaps his absence.”

“These were everyday sounds magnified by darkness. And darkness was nothing - it was not a substance, it was not a presence, it was no more than an absence of light.”

“You don't find happiness in the absence of problems. You find happiness in spite of problems.”

“His absence seemed a solid thing, a burden I must carry in addition to my grief… Yet I knew I would continue to live. Sometimes that knowledge seemed the worst part of my loss.”

“Absence, the highest form of presence.”

“Courage is not the absence of fear but rather the judgement that something is more important than fear; The brave may not live forever but the cautious do not live at all.”

“We fell into silence, both of us keeping our own secrets of what we'd suffered in the other's absence. I wondered if we were trying to protect each other or simply didn't want to admit to our own fears and weaknesses.”

“I'm not making a problem out of a personal question; I make of a personal question an absence of a problem.”

“The color white is the absence of memory.”

“Darkness is only light's absence.”

“Because it is senior year I have begun to see things as potential absences. The things I love will become the things I'll miss.”

“Like a missing tooth, sometimes an absence is more noticeable than a presence.”

“Many people believe that evil is the presence of something. I think it's the absence of something.”

“In the absence of love, we began slowly but surely to fall apart.”

“No wonder studies show that women's intellectual self-esteem tends to go down as years of education go up. We have been studying our own absence.”

“Confront a corpse at least once. The absolute absence of life is the most disturbing and challenging confrontation you will ever have.
David Bowie”

“People say absence makes the heart grow fonder, but I think they’re wrong: Proximity makes the heart grow fonder.”

“Love is quite violent. It is so painful at times, so devastating. And there is nothing worse or better. We find the highs and lows equally unbearable. But then again, the absence of them is more so.”

“Discouragement is not the absence of adequacy but the absence of courage.”

“The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.”

“In a world where everyone struggles to survive whatever the cost, how could one judge those people who decide to die? No one can judge. Each person knows the extent of their own suffering or the total absence of meaning in their lives.”

“Solitude: a sweet absence of looks.”

“Love is the absence of Anxiety.”

“In you is the illusion of each day.
You arrive like the dew to the cupped flowers.
You undermine the horizon with your absence.
Eternally in flight like the wave.”

“It's impossible to defend oneself in the absence of goodwill”

“I make the other’s absence responsible for my worldliness.”

“Western dictionaries define secularism as absence of religion but Indian secularism does not mean irreligiousness. It means profusion of religions.”

“I'm always wondering if he'll return. Sometimes I pray that he doesn't. And sometimes I hope he will. I wish on falling stars and eyelashes. Absence isn't solid the way death is. It's fluid, like language. And it hurts so much… so, so much.”

“Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time.”

“You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book (Lady Chatterley, for instance), or you take a trip, or you talk with Richard, and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death.”

“Peace is not merely the absence of war but the presence of justice, of law, of order —in short, of government.”

“It’s not the parting or the absence that’s sad. You love them, and that’s why saying good-bye breaks your heart.”

“Joy was more than just an absence of discomfort.”

“This is love, she thought, isn't it? When you notice someone's absence and hate that absence more than anything? More, even, than you love his presence?”

“Hell […] is the absence of God and the presence of Time.”

“The absence of limitations is the enemy of art.”

“This endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am, intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival.”

“Immortality,' said Crake, ' is a concept. If you take 'mortality' as being, not death, but the foreknowledge of it and the fear of it, then 'immortality' is the absence of such fear. Babies are immortal. Edit out the fear, and you'll be…”

“Peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of creative alternatives for responding to conflict -- alternatives to passive or aggressive responses, alternatives to violence.”

“Separation

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.”

“What I sometimes mistake for ecstasy is simply the absence of grief.”

“Children know by instinct that hell is an absence of love, and they can pick out theirs without missing.”

“Doctors most commonly get mixed up between absence of evidence and evidence of abense”

“Grief takes many forms, including the absence of grief.”

“A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery of hardships.”

“And in the absence of facts, myth rushes in, the kudzu of history.”

“Absence is to love as wind is to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.”

“Sex could be a blissful communion,. But it could also be a weapon, and its absence, sometimes, was required for the establishment of peace.”

“Desires should never be justified,' Tehol said, wagging a finger. 'All you end up doing is illuminating the hidden reasons by virtue of their obvious absence.”

“Friends are "annuals" that need seasonal nurturing to bear blossoms. Family is a "perennial" that comes up year after year, enduring the droughts of absence and neglect. There's a place in the garden for both of them.”

“But what I found most interesting was that Aaron had apparently found a way to pass the time without her. Beside him, holding his hand, was a Moroi girl who looked about eleven but had to be older, unless he'd become a pedophile during our absence.”

“We have not touched the stars,
nor are we forgiven, which brings us back
to the hero’s shoulders and the gentleness that comes,
not from the absence of violence, but despite
the abundance of it.”

“An empty shell. Those were the first words that sprang to mind….. Something incredibly important -.. - had disappeared from Miu for good. Leaving behind not life, but its absence”

“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

“You say you felt a presence, but I only sensed an absence. A vague pain without a source. I was like a patient who cannot tell the doctor where it hurts, only that it does.”

“Every now and then she looked around for tangible evidence of his having ever been there. Where were the butterflies? the blueberries? the whistling reed? She could find nothing, for he had left nothing but his stunning absence.”

“Women tend to love men in their presence, while men tend to love women in their absence.”

“You are my angel and my damnation; in your presence I reach divine ecstasy and in your absence I descent to hell.”

“It's only a game if there is an absence of meaning. And we've already gone too far for that.”

“I mean she's Cleopatra… shouldn't she and Antony have known better? They were so different…"
"Variety is the spice of life"
"And from a thousand miles apart"
"Absence makes the heart grow fonder”

“The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.”

“I guess by now I should know enough about loss to realize that you never really stop missing someone-you just learn to live around the huge gaping hole of their absence.”

“I began to measure things in absence instead of presence.”

“How could she feel nostalgia when he was right in front of her? How can you suffer from the absence of a person who is present?”